


a steady beat

by plinys



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, F/M, The Framework Universe (Marvel)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-09
Updated: 2017-08-09
Packaged: 2018-12-13 06:48:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11754330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plinys/pseuds/plinys
Summary: She can’t remember a time they weren’t happy. But she feels like she should.(Or: Agnes, inside the Framework.)





	a steady beat

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JackEPeace](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JackEPeace/gifts), [ophvelias](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ophvelias/gifts).



> Dedicated to the only two people I know who ship this ship, it's a real shame that we don't know anybody else that does. Tragic.

There’s something wrong. 

A sinking feeling that lingers in her chest as days goes by. Sitting there, nestled between her rib cage, as though it belongs there. As if it has always belonged there. Right where her heart should be. 

Her heart that beats in a steady - one, two, three - rhythm no matter what she feels. 

As if to say that everything is alright.

Everything is alright.

A mantra she tries to repeat.

A reassurance that pushes past his lips daily.

But it’s not.

There is another feeling she holds onto, the sense that the world is not quite right, as if she is always waiting for the other shoe to drop. The inevitable to occur. She’s never fancied herself for the type of person that believed in superstition. 

She was an artist, but a rational one.

Until now.

Until Holden Radcliffe took her here, to an island paradise just for them.

A paradise that seems to be painted in similar shades. An ocean that moves with tides that don’t fluctuate. A pigmentation that always colors her cheeks in the morning air. A cup of tea that is always steeped just right. 

There’s moments where she wakes up, to an empty bed, and the feeling that the world has shifted ever so slightly, its axis adjusting. There will be a mug in the kitchen that she doesn’t remember, the curtains a color that doesn’t seem right, another line of worry gathering at the edges of a face that should be familiar by now.

And that does not account for the dreams.

The endless dreams. 

The ones that always seem to be the same, of hospital visits, and hopelessness, and books on brain waves that he thumbs through until falling asleep at his desk.

It is different when she wakes up, the dreams fading away so that they seem impossible to hold onto. 

He sits at the dining room table reading a book, but on one of her favorite artists rather than a scientific journal, and so she pulls it from his hands, and kisses him until she forgets all about the dream. 

Forgets all about the sinking feeling in her chest.

In her heart.

That even as she kisses him beats in a steady rhythm. 

One.

Two.

Three. 

They’re happy. 

She’s happy. 

She tells herself this every day because it is true, she looks at him and feels like she never has to worry about anything else again. 

As if she’s never had anything to worry about.

She can’t remember a time they weren’t happy.

But she feels like she should. 

Surely, every couple had their fights? Especially one as oddly put together as the two of them. 

A man old enough to be her father that used to laugh when she pointed that out to him.

A man that is science and answers while she’s art and passion.

A man that once put his research over their happiness when he - 

She loses the train of a thought the second she tries to hold onto it.

He left.

She feels certain that he left.

But when she closes her eyes and tries to go back to that moment she can’t remember anything other than a few work related trips away. Moments where she longed for him, but he always came back to her, just like he promised he would, years ago, standing in a train station in Paris, kissing her like a man after all his years had that just learned what love was. 

She stares as the print of the painting that hung in that train station.

That now hangs in their living room. 

A memory.

A moment that she knows was real.

She feels a rush at the memory of it, the memory of what it was like when this all began. 

She finds him out in the garden and tugs him inside, needing to feel more of him. 

Needing to feel his hands on her body. 

Needing to feel him pressing her down into their bed. 

Needing to feel familiar lips on hers. 

Needing to feel her heart beat only for him.

Steady, even in the heat of the moment.

One. 

Two.

Three. 

“How can you be happy here,” she asks, one morning, without prompting, when the tea in her cup should have long since gone cold. 

“How can I not be happy?”

There’s so many ways she could answer that. 

Especially now that she can look into his eyes and see something isn’t right.

Worry.

Uncertainty. 

“Don’t you want to travel? We used to go to all those  _ conventions, _ ” she uses his old word for them, “Expositions on the science and you would lecture give those wonderful lectures that I never really understood and-”

“I’m happy,” he tells her, reaching across the table to hold her hand. 

His hand feels colder than it should. 

Icy almost to the touch. 

She can’t remember if his hands always felt this cold.

She doesn’t ask.

Not when he speaks up again. “There’s no need to go anywhere but here, I’m retired, and I’m happy. As long as you’re happy?”

“I’m happy,” she says, just as quick as he had, but she’s not certain it feels true anymore.

Not certain the word fits right on her tongue. 

Not certain that it isn’t a lie.

At least, the beating of her heart, doesn’t betray the doubt inside of her. 

Instead it just beats on steadily. 

One.

Two.

Three. 

She wakes one morning to find there’s a television in the corner of the living room that she doesn’t remember being there. 

A simple thing, a black box that seems standard. A part of her mind insists that it’s standard and required, but she doesn’t know where the thought comes from. 

_ Required _ . 

She flicks through the channels absentmindedly.

Settling on a news report. 

An emergency broadcast, sanctioned by  _ Madame Hydra _ , a part of her says that this is normal while another part of her wonders that -

“Agnes.”

His voice, calling her name startles her, and she darts forward to grab the remote, turns the television off with a feeling like fear filling her. 

She does not know why she is afraid.

Why this feels familiar. 

Fear.

She is not certain she’s ever felt fear until that moment, not here, not in a place that was only suppose to be happy. 

The feeling, disappears though a moment later, as Holden enters the living room, a pair of garden gloves in his hand, and a smudge of dirt across his nose, “Come help me?”

And she says, “Yes,” because what else can she say. 

She always seems to say yes nowadays.

As if there was nothing else to say. 

As if that’s all there is to say.

It seems easier to say that.

No worries. Nothing to be afraid of. 

The television set will not be there when they come back in from the garden.

She will not be certain there ever was one. 

But she will stare there at the empty space along the wall where she was certain it once was.

And listen for the fear that pushes through her body.

“Is everything alright?”

“Yes,” she will say, even as she holds onto feeling that fear that makes her heartbeat keep to its steady pace.

One.

Two.

Three.

There are questions that she wants to ask. 

Words that stick in her throat.

Like:  _ Why is there nobody else here?  _

Like:  _ Why is there always food in the pantry if we never leave? _

Like:  _ Why do you sometimes look to the sky with eyes that seem almost afraid? _

Like:  _ Why do my do I feel like my head should hurt instead of my heart? _

Like:  _ Why did that woman on the television that no longer exists look like me? _

Like:  _ What secrets are you keeping from me? _

The last one finds it’s way to her lips.

Accidental.

Unable to take it back. 

Spilling forth into the space between them. 

Ruining the domestic mood in an instant. 

“I’m not,” he insists.

“I know you better that that,” she replies. 

He looks away from her. An answer all the same. 

She falls asleep in a bed that is cold and empty.

In the morning, she can’t remember why he fell asleep on the couch. 

Can’t remember why he looks at her with a nervous but hopeful look. 

Can’t remember feeling anything but complete trust in this man.

Trust that makes her heart beat steady and true.

One.

Two.

Three. 

She kisses him because it’s easier than thinking about sinking feeling where her heart should be. 

She kisses him here in a world that is perfect and paradise and everything she ever wanted.

She kisses him as though there’s no questions running through her mind.

She kisses him until she forgets how to do anything else. 

She kisses him like tomorrow she may die.

She kisses him.

And her heartbeat is steady.

One.

Two.

Three.

There’s never been anyone else on the island.

Until there suddenly is. 

Until it’s suddenly too late.

“Holden what’s happening? Who are these people?”

He holds her face, not the man she loves with tenderness and grace. But a man that is a stranger to her, with strange hands, he tilts it as he speaks, as if she is his property, as if she is nothing. He’s saying things, words that barely register, barely register over the feeling of how something is not right.

How that horror movie feeling inside of her is finally becoming real.

“She even has your face.”

There’s a question she had been meaning to ask before, a question she had forgotten - “Wh - Why does she look like me, Holden?”

“Don’t panic, love. I can explain all of this,” he says, and she wants to believe him. Even if it only makes I-I-I’ve been meaning to really, but the timing just-”

There’s words being said. Words that don’t make sense to her. That she doesn’t have the context for. And that  she has a sinking feeling she will never have the context for.

She wonders if it would not be too late to go back to how things were.

If had she known this was coming, she would have enjoyed this paradise more, and not lingered on the doubts inside her head. Inside her chest. 

“This is Agnes. She’s harmless,” he tells them, these people she does not know. These people he seems to know. He tells them this about her. A truth. “There’s no threat. You have to believe me.” 

They don’t believe him.

She’s not even sure she can believe him.

But it does not matter, because there is a gun pointed at her chest, and the fear is back. 

The tears come easy. 

Certain.

“Then convince me.”

She knows, what Holden does not, or what Holden is unwilling to admit. That there is no happy ending for them. That their paradise is falling to ruins around them.

She knows, somewhere deep inside of her, that this never was a happy ending.

She knows, of another world, a world that had came to her in dreams, but is confirmed to be a reality, a world where she loved a man who left her, a world where she was dying, a world she left behind. 

She knows, that the tears falling from her eyes will be the last tears that she ever cries. 

“I know exactly who I am,” the man holding a gun to her chest says.

She wishes she felt the same.

As her heart beats steady one last time.

One. 

Two.

Th-


End file.
